Newark promotes prisoner re-entry program

With Newark's unemployment rate stuck at twice the state average of 4.9 percent, Mayor Cory Booker has tried to make prisoner re-entry a signature issue, aware that his twin promises of safety and economic vitality depend on it, according to a report in The New York Times.

The city's two leading problems, crime and unemployment, are intertwined with the huge number of ex-convicts in the city. Some 2,300 men and women pour into the city from prison each year, and 65 percent are rearrested within five years, according to the paper. One in six adult residents of the city has a criminal record.

Booker is part of a growing national movement of local and state politicians trying to tackle the problem.

He has recruited 50 local companies to hire ex-convicts screened by the city's workforce-development agency, rewarding them with tax breaks, and persuaded 300 lawyers who had volunteered on his campaign to donate their services to felons facing legal obstacles to employment. He is selling city land at a discount to developers willing to employ former prisoners on their construction sites.